How is gaming performance on a Windows emulator running on Linux?

[TopWargamer]

Windows 10 and I have a love hate relationship at the moment. Love the OS, but everyday or every other day it freezes. No not the traditional freeze, restart, and it fixes it. I can open up (some) applications, move my mouse around, and click the start button. What I can't do is minimize/close stuff, swap tabs, click the restart/shutdown button, etc. It's really freaking annoying, especially since only part of it is frozen and other parts are not. 

 

And here I am, thinking of switching to Linux, yet I need the game support, so I thought about running Windows 10 through an emulator on Linux whenever I needed to play any games that don't support Linux. I'm just not sure how the performance would be though. I know I'll take a performance hit, but how bad will it be? 

 

Quick specs for my computer: 3770k, 16GB RAM, GTX 1070

[Shubham Yadav]

You should:

• Try doing factory reset from the settings menu
• try installing the OS from fresh after a clean wipe.
• If none of the above works, then only think of going to Linux.

Wine sucks in gaming performance. Your 1070 will perform worse than a 1060 and there is a good CPU overhead too. Using windows 10 in two of my devices with no issues whatsoever.

[TopWargamer]

2 minutes ago, Shubham Yadav said:

You should:

• Try doing factory reset from the settings menu
• try installing the OS from fresh after a clean wipe.
• If none of the above works, then only think of going to Linux.

Wine sucks in gaming performance. Your 1070 will perform worse than a 1060 and there is a good CPU overhead too. Using windows 10 in two of my devices with no issues whatsoever.

I'm not talking about WINE. I'm talking emulating Windows 10 through Virtual Box or something like that, on Linux, so that I can play any games that don't support. Any games that support Linux, I would play on Linux. Same goes for applications.

 

As for the clean install, I did that a couple weeks ago, and it did not help.

[Mira Yurizaki]

You need a VM that virtualizes the graphics card, otherwise you're stuck with abysmal performance, if you can even get the thing running. And as far as I can tell, the hypervisors of VMMs that let you do that aren't cheap.

[ARikozuM]

33 minutes ago, TopWargamer said:

Windows 10 and I have a love hate relationship at the moment. Love the OS, but everyday or every other day it freezes. No not the traditional freeze, restart, and it fixes it. I can open up (some) applications, move my mouse around, and click the start button. What I can't do is minimize/close stuff, swap tabs, click the restart/shutdown button, etc. It's really freaking annoying, especially since only part of it is frozen and other parts are not. 

 

And here I am, thinking of switching to Linux, yet I need the game support, so I thought about running Windows 10 through an emulator on Linux whenever I needed to play any games that don't support Linux. I'm just not sure how the performance would be though. I know I'll take a performance hit, but how bad will it be? 

 

Quick specs for my computer: 3770k, 16GB RAM, GTX 1070

Why not dual-boot?

[VicBar]

Gaming on a VM is less than ideal as everyone knows, but there is a way to get an almost native gaming experience through a technique called GPU Passthrough (or PCI Passthrough).

 

It consists of giving the Virtual Machine the (almost complete) control of the GPU, having it connect "through" the host system.

 

I too have decided that the optimal setup for me is to have only Linux in my SSD instead of it dual booting and sharing with Windows. I will only make the full transition one I can get a Virtual Machine inside my Linux distro than can do GPU Passthrough. I haven't gotten it to work yet, but I am not yet defeated. I have tried with VMWare Workstation Pro, but it does not support it, KVM or QEMU supposedly do, but I have yet to go that route.

 

Anyway I have complied a ton of info on it so here you go:

http://www.se7ensins.com/forums/threads/how-to-setup-a-gaming-virtual-machine-with-gpu-passthrough-qemu-kvm-libvirt-and-vfio.1371980/

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2z0evz/gpu_passthrough_or_how_to_play_any_game_at_near/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IOMMU-supporting_hardware

https://bufferoverflow.io/gpu-passthrough/

 

I say pick one and go at it. But I want to ask you how experienced are you with Linux?

Edited September 9, 2016 by VicBar
Spell check

[TopWargamer]

7 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Why not dual-boot?

It's less convenient, plus I was curious about emulated gaming performance.

[TopWargamer]

8 minutes ago, VicBar said:

Gaming on a VM is less than ideal as everyone knows, but there is a way to get an almost native gaming experience through a technique called GPU Passthrough (or PCI Passthrough).

 

It consists of giving the Virtual Machine the (almost complete) control of the GPU, having it connect "through" the host system.

 

I too have decided that the optimal setup for me is to have only Linux in my SSD instead of it dual booting and sharing with Windows. I will only make the full transition one I can get a Virtual Machine inside my Linux distro than can do GPU Passthrough. I haven't gotten it to work yet, but I am not yet defeated. I have tried with VMWare Workstation Pro, but it does not support it, KVM or QEMU supposedly do, but I have yet to go that route.

 

Anyway I have complied a ton of info on it so here you go:

http://www.se7ensins.com/forums/threads/how-to-setup-a-gaming-virtual-machine-with-gpu-passthrough-qemu-kvm-libvirt-and-vfio.1371980/

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2z0evz/gpu_passthrough_or_how_to_play_any_game_at_near/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IOMMU-supporting_hardware

https://bufferoverflow.io/gpu-passthrough/

 

I say pick one and go at it. But I want to ask you how experienced are you with Linux?

Thanks for the info! I've used multiple Linux distros several times before in the past. I even run it on my laptop. I can do the basic things to survive on Linux, but I would love to learn the more in depth stuff.

[iamdarkyoshi]

Have you tried running memtest86? Most weird unexplainable things are caused by faulty RAM

[TopWargamer]

3 minutes ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

Have you tried running memtest86? Most weird unexplainable things are caused by faulty RAM

I have not, but I will definitely try that though. I would prefer to stay on Windows on my main computer, and if swapping out RAM fixes my issue, then so be it.

[iamdarkyoshi]

Just now, TopWargamer said:

I have not, but I will definitely try that though. I would prefer to stay on Windows on my main computer, and if swapping out RAM does that, then so be it.

Most RAM has a lifetime warranty. Which is good, because I had bad RAM. Twice.

 

Caused all sorts of nonsense and after 10 OS reinstalls on 10 different drives, someone told me to try memtest. Bingo.